Honored at the Take Back America conference.

She makes us proud.

There is a name plate for Digby at the Take Back America conference. Does that mean Digby will be revealed? Atrios links to this funny post and to pictures of some of our good friends.

Sure there are lots of good things going at the conference I bet, but "who is Digby?" is the story of the day.

My day job takes me to Telluride today, where I'll be until Thursday evening. I'd love to stay for the Blue Grass Festival which starts Thursday, but I have to be back in Denver for court Friday afternoon and will miss it. Too bad, I even had a ticket.

We are excited to welcome one of the great folk-rock-soul bands of their generation, Counting Crows, to headline the opening night, Summer Solstice. We welcome back two of our all-time favorite performers after a year away: Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss. Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas will be performing both their own set of sophisticated newgrass and a special set with guitar legend Tony Rice featuring a spectrum of material from Tony's 35 year career. Los Lobos, a band that has been in existence for longer than Telluride Bluegrass, makes their debut at the Festival on Friday night.

The full lineup is here.

If you can't make Telluride, you can plan now for the Aspen-Snowmass Jazzfest Labor Day Weekend.

As I always say, 'tis a privilege to live in Colorado. This is an open thread, so please talk about whatever you want.

(Photo by Rashomon)

Via Matt Yglesias, the ugly face of the Right Blogosphere, duly endorsed by the all important Instapundit link:

Not that I'm saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one's duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one's pain threshold.

Perhaps we can all understand better now what we are dealing with. The violent hatred expressed by the Right is truly toxic. What say you Howie Kurtz? Joe Klein?

Happy Fathers Day, everyone. How about a Sunday open thread?

The must-read of the day in my view is Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib, The General's Report.

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint.

A sample of what we didn't see:

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees....Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it.

Why didn't we see them?

Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

More on Rumsfeld:

With all the activity this week, I forgot to do an open thread. Here it is. You pick the topics, we'll all just read along and respond.

It's our 5th blogiversary today. (Yes, as Skippy would say, we coined that phrase.) I'm really amazed. I had no idea when I sat at the computer one weekend in June, 2002 to create TalkLeft that I'd still be doing this five years later. There's no turning back now.

Thanks to all of you who read TalkLeft. You've made the time investment so worthwhile.

A little TalkLeft history for those who are interested, below the fold:

I'm always the last to know. From a diary at Daily Kos:

And today you have the opportunity to listen to [Big Tent Democrat, aka Armando on] On Topic at Political Nexus.  The show will begin tonight at 5pm PST (8pm EST)--those who wish to listen live can do so at the "On Topic" BlogTalkRadio page (the only show currently listed is the one we did with MSOC on abortion; it will appear when the show goes live.)  Otherwise, you can access the archives of the show either at Political Nexus or at the BlogTalkRadio On Topic page.

Among the topics we'll be discussing during the half-hour show include:

More...

The last episode of the Sopranos. It all ends tonight.

Were you satisfied?

Monday Update: I hated it. I watched it again tonight to see if I felt differently. I didn't. It teased and manipulated and then didn't deliver.

I'm at the NORML conference.

We're creating a blog with Blogger.

Tommy Chong was here yesterday. Here's a picture of him and me.

Gotta go now. More later.

This is an open thraad.

Joe Lieberman stakes out a position held only by Dick Cheney:

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

(Emphasis supplied.) If our soldiers were not in Iraq, they would not be subject to these attacks Lieberman. As I have said many times, the way to stop war with Iran is to end the Debacle in Iraq.

On a related note, noted "extremist" hunter Joe Klein discovers that there is no such thing as a precipitous withdrawal:

In light of the recent anti-primary posts at daily kos, one can see a split developing in the Netroots when you compare those posts to this one at MYDD:

Labor is the pillar of the progressive community, and is openly being dismissed as irrelevant. . . . The progressive movement on the internet isn't recognizing these realities either. . . . The people in charge of the political system are the swing votes and the people that those voters want to work with. Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel have positioned themselves to be this swing vote, and they have chosen to basically throw some crumbs our way (minimum wage) while voting with the Republicans on the big issues, like Iraq. This isn't permanent. . . . [W]e can broaden out and build bridges between progressives and independents. We can learn to educate and/or cut off people like Udall, and encourage labor to stand up harder for workers.

And primaries, one presumes, will be central to that. If that is the case, no member of the Netroots should ever argue against ANY primary. Do they propose that Netroots leaders get to decide when primaries are good?